Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (review)

This monograph, adapted from the author’s dissertation, is a study of the free colored population of Saint Domingue, now known as Haiti, in the decades prior to the outbreak of the French colony’s revolution in 1791. These free men and women of color were the offspring of white men and black or mixed-race women, and, in King’s opinion, “functioned as an intermediate class . . . between slave and free and between black and white. Sharing characteristics of both groups, they served as a bridge or buffer between them” (xi). In exploring the individual and collective experience of this group, King presents a detailed exegesis of a hitherto unexplored archive, a collection of approximately four thousand notarial documents relating to acts, such as wills, lawsuits, and business agreements, in which a free person of color was an important participant.

Through intensive examination of this notarial archive, King develops several conclusions about the lives of Saint Domingue’s free colored inhabitants. Of particular note was this group’s commitment to ownership of slaves; on the eve of the Haitian Revolution, free people of color owned approximately thirty percent of the island’s slaves. Indeed, some free colored families, epitomized by the Laporte clan of Limonade, on Saint Domingue’s northern coast, ascended the ranks of the colony’s planter elite, numbering their slaves in the hundreds, deploying objects such as carriages, jewelry, lavish clothing, and luxurious home appurtenances in order to display their wealth, and seeing themselves as “the equals of the white planters” (xix). In contrast to these wearers of powdered wigs, many other free men of color sported the blue coat of the colonial military, using armed service to make the kinds of contacts which might lead to social prestige and financial success. According to King, the two groups were marked by sharply differing attitudes regarding their respective places in Saint Dominguan society; whereas “the planter elite was principally connected to wealthy white society . . . warm relations with the rest of colored society distinguished the military leadership group” (270–271).

Scholars of the Caribbean, and of slavery and race in general, will be inclined to welcome a work which explores the experiences of free men and women of color within a colonial plantation society, and particularly one which deals with Saint Domingue upon the eve of the only successful slave rebellion in the Atlantic world and the birth of the western hemisphere’s first “black republic.” Unfortunately, they are likely to find Blue Coat or Powdered Wig at least as frustrating as it may be enlightening. The book displays all the marks of a dissertation which has been turned too quickly into a monograph. Throughout, the author’s writing style is long-winded, laborious, and, in some instances, opaque. Moreover, King presents an account of his sources and research methodology which is extremely lengthy, yet fails to offer the reader a satisfying precis of his project.

As problematic as the book’s formal aspects are, its conceptual framework is still more troubling. King’s principal problem is that he seems to be reluctant to interrogate the concepts of race and color upon which his study centers. At no point does the reader learn what meaning or meanings blackness held within the society or culture of eighteenth-century France or its colonies. Why were French colonists so much more open in their interracial relationships, and so much more willing to emancipate and grant financial support to their mixed-race children, than were the planters of Anglo-America? Why did Saint Domingue’s free people of color choose to participate in such colonial institutions as military service, plantation agriculture, and ownership of slaves? How did the social and economic roles of free people of color, and their conception of themselves in relation to racial identity, change over the course of the eighteenth century? And, perhaps most importantly, how did the presence of this free colored population influence the outbreak or...